


Home (Is Wherever I'm With You)

by ihopehellhaswifi



Series: Just Like Heaven [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Romance, can stand alone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-20
Updated: 2014-09-20
Packaged: 2018-02-18 02:47:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2332478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ihopehellhaswifi/pseuds/ihopehellhaswifi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes the universe twists the roads that lead us home. Ficlet.</p><p>A tragedy, but with a happy ending depending on how you turn the crystal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home (Is Wherever I'm With You)

**Author's Note:**

> The title is taken from Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. (Recommended listening for before or after reading.)

The topic of mortality never came up in serious conversation. A joke here, a snarky comment there. Nothing overtly painful. Always safe. Barely brushing the outskirts of Gabriel's mind as though trampled down by some willful ignorance.

The job was dangerous. You knew it. He knew it. But you'd both been alone a lot longer than you'd been together, and old habits die hard.

You'd buried him once. You'd grieved for months. At night, the image of his burnt out wings sprawled across the motel banquet hall floor would fill your vision and you'd wake in a sobbing, sweaty mess.

You'd buried him, and with him a piece of yourself, and you did not want to be. You became reckless, volatile.

Still, you carried on because you needed to, and because you'd been alone a lot longer than you'd been together, and because he would have expected nothing less.

But mostly because you knew that, even in death, you could never again find him.

You could never go home.

_____________________

As suddenly as he'd been taken from you, he returned.

_Woke up in a field in Memphis. Not sure what happened, sweetheart._

You'd stared into the space he might have been occupying, unresponsive, knowing you'd suffered some kind of psychotic break.

On the third night after his return, he set out to prove his corporeality, and you let him.

As you lay in his arms afterward, you laughed hysterically until tears streamed down your face.

_**I buried you. I buried you. I'm never doing that again.** _

_____________________

He watched you closely in the beginning. You hadn't been the same since he came back. You were subdued and angry and distracted, and for weeks you'd stared at him as though he were a problem that you needed to solve.

The job didn't allow for distractions. The job didn't allow for mistakes.

He was concerned.

But then, gradually, the spark came back into your eyes. You laughed more easily. You were quicker to accept his proffered arm, rather than staring as though it would vanish within your grasp. When your attention to the job returned, he breathed a sigh of relief, probably audible to the heavens.

You fell back into your routines.

_Watch your back on the hunt, sweet thang._  
_**Don't worry, it's just a rawhead.** _

_Take care tonight, sugar._  
_**I think I can handle a wampus cat.** _

And life was back to normal. You looked after yourselves.

You'd been alone a lot longer than you'd been together.

_**Passed a neat-looking candy shop on the way into town. Be back soon.** _

Reclining on the hotel bed, folding your note into a children's fortune telling game, he never expected the pang in his chest, nor the panic that swelled there as sirens sounded in the distance.

_____________________

He buried you once, and only once. Grief ripped at him in ways he'd forgotten existed. Every single time he blinked, the image of your broken body lying in the street assaulted him.

The way your blood fanned out behind you, seeping around the contents of your brown paper shopping bag that now littered the ground.

How he'd taken your face in both hands and stared into your empty eyes and brushed back your hair and begged you to be okay.

He relived how he'd reached and reached to latch onto your soul and bring you back.

How he'd seen it and knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that he had absolutely no right.

He'd found the driver of the vehicle that struck you. He killed them repeatedly and in increasingly violent ways pertaining to the operation of motor vehicles while intoxicated.

He contemplated resurrecting them one last time to let them learn from their mistake, but ultimately determined their death would prove therapeutic for himself.

Maybe you would have approved. Maybe not.

He buried you once, and he buried a part of himself with you. But he could live with that.

Because even in your death, he knew he could find you again.

With a last glance around a world that was now far too small and empty, he did something he hadn't done in millenia.

Gabriel went home.  


End file.
